Philosophy, literature, science, culture

Sunday’s Sermon: a riddle.

The following poem was published on February 2, 1833, in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. It contains descriptions and clues of 11 famous literary figures. The poem was only attributed to “P.” However, 20th century literature professor Thomas Ollive Mabbott credits Edgar Allan Poe with writing the poem. Mabbott also managed to identify all 11 literary figures hidden in the verse.

Enigma

The noblest name in Allegory’s page,

The hand that traced inexorable rage;

A pleasing moralist whose page refined,

Displays the deepest knowledge of the mind;

A tender poet of a foreign tongue,

(Indited in the language that he sung.)

A bard of brilliant but unlicensed page

At once the shame and glory of our age,

The prince of harmony and stirling sense,

The ancient dramatist of eminence,

The bard that paints imagination’s powers,

And him whose song revives departed hours,

Once more an ancient tragic bard recall,

In boldness of design surpassing all.

These names when rightly read, a name [make] known

Which gathers all their glories in its own.

[Some of the literary figures in Poe’s poem “Enigma” are much more obvious than others, partially due to the relevance that these writers have maintained in the 21st century. Some are from the ancient world, and some are Poe’s contemporaries. Many of the storytellers that Poe identifies had a knack for penning speculative poems—tales of dreams and faeries and monsters and gods and the like. In a way, the poem Enigma is Poe’s list of the founders of fantasy, science fiction, and horror.]

Humanist Perspectives

Nietzsche

Fallacies

John Dominic Crossan

“Just because the Bible says “Jesus is the Lamb of God,” it doesn’t follow that Mary had a little lamb.”

Richard Dawkins: Unweaving the Rainbow

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats. scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumber the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Words to live by – Douwe Stuurman

what you will love mostis to walkon the earth

Julius Caesar Lecture

Story

Grow a Soul

“One of the attractions of the UU approach to religion and life is caught in the assertion that divinity and spirit are to be found not through blind faith but through finding and sending down roots to the deepest part of one’s unique self. As is true in botany, those roots spread out into the wider community and can nourish us and give us a healthy life. How do we know when we are living in the best place for those roots to grow? In so much as we do indeed “grow a soul” we should consider carefully the garden in which that soul grows.” - Bob Lane

Bertrand Russell

When you are studying any matter or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts.

The moral thing I should wish to say to them is very simple. I should say love is wise, hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. And if we are to live together and not die together, we should learn the kind of tolerance which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.

Religion

I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is a somewhat new kind of religion. -Albert Einstein